Mutual Exclusivity Revisited – When Pragmatics overrides Novelty

Abstract

Children typically apply a novel label to a novel object, rather
than to a familiar object; a phenomenon called Mutual Exclusivity (Markman et
al., 2003). A recent explanation is that children tend to associate novel stimuli
together (Horst et al., 2011). We show that pragmatic factors may override
novelty. In our study two-year-old children first played with a novel object
together with E1. Then E1 left the room and E2 brought another three novel
objects for the child to manipulate on his/her own. Finally, E1 came back and
requested the child to give her the ‘Bitye’. Most children chose the
first object, with which they had a common history with E1, even though it was
the least novel. This suggests that children understand a novel word by
considering to which object the speaker is most likely to have intended to
refer.